The Smartest Book in the World

by Greg Proops

  silently

  drills through a chestnut

  •

  All my friends

  viewing the moon—

  an ugly bunch

  •

  falling sick on a journey

  my dream goes wandering

  over a field of dried grass

  SMARTEST BOOK BASEBALL TEAM VII

  The Women in History Baseball Team

  Manager: HARRIET TUBMAN (d. 1913)

  Tubman can give the steal-away sign like no other. She made nineteen forays to free slaves and rescued her own family. Sometimes she pulled a gun on reluctant fugitives, telling them, “You’ll be free or die.” That is decisive action. She is in charge.

  First Base: SACAGAWEA (d. 1812)

  Sacagawea was kidnapped as a child, and was the only Woman on the Lewis and Clark expedition. She interpreted, dug wild artichokes, saved their bacon more than once, and gave birth. She needs no help scooping grounders.

  Second Base: HYPATIA OF ALEXANDRIA (d. 415)

  Beloved scholar, teacher, and radical educator, Hypatia drove her own chariot and invented the astrolabe and the hydrometer. She ran afoul of Bishop Cyril by being independent and anaytical. Christian fanatics pulled her from her carriage and killed her. Cyril got made a saint; Hypatia got a better deal—a movie starring Rachel Weisz. We give her the beloved second sack to defend.

  Shortstop: MARIE CURIE (1867–1934)

  Marie Curie won two Nobel Prizes. In different fields. Her husband, daughter, and both sons-in-law also won Nobel Prizes. She coined the term radioactivity and drove ambulances kitted out with X-ray machines to the front in WWI. She spent her prize money on helping the Allies. Her papers and effects remain dangerously radioactive. She glows like the universe, at short.

  Third Base: JOAN OF ARC (d. 1431)

  Saint Joan was a teenage general and the savior of France. Inspired by spirits, she went to the king, took over the army, and had a spell of beating down the English. They say butterflies followed in her wake, and she wept over the wounded. Fierce and motivated by the highest principles, she is all-time at third.

  Left Field: SUSAN B. ANTHONY (1820–1906)

  Susan B. was one of the great advocates for the equality of Women. Arrested, burned in effigy, and turned away by men—she would not be ignored. She traveled far and wide and petitioned the government ceaselessly for the right to vote. She spoke before every Congress from 1869 to 1906 to ask for passage of a suffrage amendment. She can organize left field.

  Center Field: LA MALINCHE (d. c. 1529)

  Born to a noble family, La Malinche was captured and sold into slavery. She was given to Cortez during his run to Tenochtitlán. When he was told she spoke several languages, she was given the job as chief translator and negotiator. She gets a bad rap as a conspirator and traitor, but the Aztecs were imperious and the time was ripe for local tribes to rebel and join Cortez in trying to smash the empire. Doña Marina—as the Spanish called her—bore a son with Cortez and is, for good or ill, a mother of Mexico. She gets the call in the big field.

  Right Field: BETTY FORD (1918–2011)

  A dancer and the smart one in the marriage with President Gerald Ford, Betty was an advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion. She was fiercely honest about her fights with breast cancer and addiction. She made it okay for people to be real about chemical dependency while maintaining a dignified stance. Forthright and brave, Betty Ford is the candid right fielder.

  Pitcher: HILLARY CLINTON (1947–)

  Hillary has been a First Lady, the first First Lady to hold elected office, a senator, and a secretary of state. She is badassador eternal. She dominates the mound. She can bring it down the middle or skew either way if the going gets hot. Listed at 5'6"—no matter her height, she stands tall.

  Catcher: HARRIS “MOTHER” JONES (1837–1930)

  Mother Jones lost her whole family to yellow fever. Then she moved back to Chicago, lost her shop and all her belongings to the Great Fire of 1871. She hit the road as a labor crusader and social activist. She was what we call “an agitator,” meaning she fought for better working conditions for miners and to abolish child labor. She can catch all of it and give it back double.

  The Women of History team has the least solid birthdates of any list. Do we really not value Women so much that we don’t care when they were born? Maybe the ugly icky white men who keep history could have paid more attention. Oh, they couldn’t. They were men, so they were thinking of themselves.

  BASEBALL III

  Satchel Paige

  (1906–1982)

  I’ll be thirty-five this year, and I can only pitch as long as Satchel Paige. That gives me thirty-five more years.

  —Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Tug McGraw

  Satchel Paige is an American hero, and one day, if you are good, he will be your hero as well. Paige is the most famous player from the Negro Leagues—leagues that existed because blacks and whites were not allowed to play together. Paige swung and swore. He struck guys out with crazy fastballs. He bragged and showboated and chased the ladies and made a bundle during the Depression when hardly anyone—much less a black man from the South—could do such a thing. He showed America that the black person could be everything the white was in that most narrow-minded and patriotic pastime: the old ball game. He had fun doing it. The greatest clown and showman and maybe the greatest pitcher ever. He persisted and endured countless shortings, slightings, threats, injustices, and nasty prejudice, and came through it all with humor and cool. He was not the first to break the color line in baseball, but he was the first to captivate hearts and minds by playing with, for, and against white folks for dozens of years while the evidence piled up that segregation was bound to fail in the end.

  With Paige it is not just a matter of what he did, which is monumental—it is also a matter of what he might have done had he been allowed to play in the white leagues in his prime. He is the most colorful ambassador baseball ever produced, and he charmed the whole hemisphere with his wild individualism. That’s why he is my hero. He had the bluster of Ali, the courage of Wilma Rudolph, the panache of Arthur Ashe, and the agelessness of Lena Horne. Like contemporaries Jesse Owens, the great Olympian, and Joe Louis, the champion boxer, he was a towering figure in sports, a Number 1 pitcher, as he would say.

  Some people are described as “legendary,” but Satchel Paige legendizes the word. He was the first black man to pitch in the American League, first to pitch in the World Series, first Negro League player in the Hall of Fame, and the writer of two autobiographies. He embodies longevity. One of his two bios he called Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever, and appropriately so: he had a rubber arm that let him pitch for over forty years. Nolan Ryan, he of unflagging stamina and a million no-hitters, pitched a puny twenty-seven years. Paige’s first game was in the 1920s and his last game was in 1965 (for real), and he was still packing them in. He kind of still is.

  Leroy Paige had a rough start—he was born somewhere around 1906 to dire poverty in a shotgun house in Mobile, Alabama. He was the seventh of twelve children; his large family headed by his mother, the formidable Lula. Like Babe Ruth, he is a typical poor kid who climbs out of being barefoot and poor to make a huge name for himself. As a boy, he was a loner and a truant, and he hung around the river throwing rocks at everything, harder than anyone else. Like everything with him, where the nickname “Satchel” comes from isn’t altogether certain. He started work as a child, carrying satchels on a stick at the train station, and so it may be there that the name was born. Eventually, he hit the streets and started hanging with an unsavory crowd. Caught stealing costume jewelry, he landed in children’s jail, where he met a coach who turned him around and who realized his value as a star attraction. Under the guidance of Coach Byrd, Paige learned his wild style of high-kicking his giant right foot in front of him so he could whip the fastball in around it. Paige had found his calling as an ace pitcher. Tall and skinny and just a kid, in 1926 he got an offer
from the Chattanooga Black Lookouts, and, with his mom’s approval and the understanding he would send her money, he signed. Once he was in organized ball, he made the world take notice.

  Paige’s hallmark was brash cockiness and hilarious theatrics. He threw fast and with deadly accuracy. He could throw a ball over a bottle cap or gum wrapper with alarming consistency. Then tell you all about it. At the start of his career, he threw only fastballs, and he even painted the word fastball on the bottom of his shoe so the other team knew what was coming. His fastball had as many names as the Hindu gods: Thoughtful Stuff, the Bat Dodger, the Four-Day Rider, Peas at the Knees, and the Be-ball, because, as he said, “It be where I want it to be.” His wild antics and sense of promotion were rocketing him to black ball stardom.

  His marquee move was “Guaranteed to strike out the side.” A sign would announce his eminence: “World’s Greatest Pitcher Leroy Satchel Paige Guaranteed to Strike Out the First Nine Men or Your Money Back.” Baby, this would sell the tickets. He would call in the outfield and sometimes had the infield sit down while he took care of business. Occasionally they played cards on the mound behind him. This outrageous showboating made the fans go crazy, and within a year his team was farming him out to pitch for other teams.

  The notorious Gus Greenlee, a racketeer and numbers runner, one of a handful of blacks in ’30s America with capital to run a ball club, signed him up. He built the first black-owned baseball park, and he started the second Negro National League. Greenlee was also the owner of the Pittsburgh Crawfords. The 1930s Craws are considered the greatest Negro League team of all time. Some call them the greatest team of all time.

  WILD TIMES AT THE CRAWFORD GRILL

  Crawford Grill was Gus Greenlee’s place, a hoppin’ joint in the Hill district of Pittsburgh that all the jazz cats played, like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan. Superstar Lena Horne worked downstairs, and her father worked upstairs, where the numbers money was counted. “Numbers” is a catchall for an illegal lottery traditionally played by the poor, and Greenlee was in charge of that racket in Pittsburgh. You could bet as little as a penny on a series of three numbers taken from the totals of racetrack betting printed in the paper. The counters had to deal with mountains of small change. The players ate and made the scene there after ball games. Just across the street in the barbershop, Paige would hold court all day, sending kids over to get food and beer so he could keep his stories going.

  It was also here that Paige met his first wife, Janet Howard, working behind the counter. Greenlee paid for their wedding at the Grill. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the dancer, co-founder of the Black Yankees, and movie star partner to Shirley Temple, was the best man.

  If you want to know the truth, I wasn’t the onliest one who could pitch in the Negro Leagues. I told them at Cooperstown we had a lot of Satchels, there were a lot of Joshes. We had top pitchers. We had quite a few men who could hit the ball like Babe and Josh. Wasn’t any mebbe so.

  —Satchel Paige

  The Crawfords ball club was loaded with Negro League stars: “Cool Papa” Bell, who was so fast he could turn the light out and be in bed before the room got dark, hit leadoff; affable Josh Gibson, the “Black Babe Ruth,” was the catcher; tempestuous star Oscar Charleston, whom many consider to be one of the best players of all time, was finishing up his illustrious career and managing; and Paige was the ace and top draw on a team of big names.

  Josh Gibson, described by Bill Veeck as “at the minimum, two Yogi Berras,” and Satchel Paige are linked as teammates first as the greatest battery in black ball and later as rivals. They both went into the Hall of Fame, though Gibson was long gone by then. Josh was a good catcher and superb slugger and the easygoing lovable lug to Paige’s showboat braggadocio. They played on the Craws and barnstormed in Central America, but Gibson came back to the States where he hit an alarming number of homers. He is said to have hit the ball all the way out of Yankee Stadium. He is the only man to do so. Paige faced Gibson in the Negro World Series of 1942. In his autobiography, he recalls walking a batter to load the bases and then Gibson coming up. Paige told him he would get only fastballs, and the first two pitches were blazing strikes. “One more to go, I knew Josh knew it. The crowd knew it. It was so tense you could feel everything jingling,” Paige recalled. “The last one was a three-quarter sidearm curveball. He got back on his heels. He was looking for a fastball.” It was knee-high on the outside corner. Strike three. “Josh threw that bat of his four thousand feet and stomped off the field.” Gibson was always genial, but late in his career started to drink heavily and became broody and delusional. He died of a stroke or a brain tumor hallucinating he was going to be called up to the white big leagues. A very tragic end for the greatest Negro League hitter of all. Satchel and Josh were close buddies and friendly counterparts to the last.

  Paige also barnstormed every year against Dizzy Dean. Dizzy was the bragginest, rowdiest, most popular player in white ball after Babe Ruth. The leader of the famous St. Louis “Gas House Gang,” Dean is the last pitcher to win thirty games in the National League. He also grew up poor in the South, picking cotton shoulder to shoulder with blacks, and he loved playing against Paige. They riffed, held mock arguments, imitated each other’s exaggerated wind-ups, trash-talked each other, and pretended to fight with the umps. They put on a great show for the fans in L.A. and all over the country where there were no big league teams. Dizzy said of those days, “If Satch and I were pitching on the same team, we’d clinch the pennant by the Fourth of July and go fishing until World Series time.”

  A bunch of the fellows gets in a barber session the other day, and they start to arguefy about the best pitcher they ever see. Some says Lefty Grove and Lefty Gomez and Walter Johnson and old Pete Alexander and Dazzy Vance. And they mention Lonnie Warneke and Van Mungo and Carl Hubbell, and Johnny Corriden tells us about Matty, and he sure must have been great, and some of the boys say Old Diz is the best they ever see. But I see all them fellows but Matty and Johnson, and I know who’s the best pitcher I ever see, and it’s old Satchel Paige, that big lanky colored boy. Say, Old Diz is pretty fast back in 1933 and 1934, and you know my fastball looks like a change of pace alongside that little pistol bullet old Satchel shoots up to the plate. . . . It’s too bad those colored boys don’t play in the big leagues, because they sure got some great ballplayers. Anyway, that skinny old Satchel Paige with those long arms is my idea of the pitcher with the greatest stuff I ever saw.

  —Dizzy Dean, 1938 interview

  Sometime during the years of WWII, Dean got a triple off Paige in a charity game. Paige shouted at him, “I hope all your friends brought plenty to eat, because if they wait for you to score, they’re gonna be here past dark. You ain’t goin’ no further.” He retired the next three batters; like Dizzy once said, “It ain’t braggin’ if you can do it.”

  PAIGE AND HIS WOMEN

  All he’s doing is living a sinful, shiftless life. All I can do is keep writing and reminding him to go to Mass and be careful of gambling and the wild women out there.

  —Lula Paige

  Paige was the top draw in baseball. Chicks dug him. “I’m not married,” he once said, “but I am in great demand.” It had been a fun party at the beginning, but Satchel was—to put it mildly—not a mindful or attentive husband. He blew all the money he was making barnstorming. Paige spent a fortune on colorful suits, shotguns, fishing gear, big cars, and hunting dogs. In his heyday, he was making five grand a week, loads for the Depression, and he held on to little of the cash. He confessed, “I have trouble holding on to the old green.” The marriage to Janet Howard was not a triumph; Paige catted around too much on the road. She finally served him divorce papers before a game at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Paige mistakenly signed it thinking it was a fan asking for his autograph.

  He married another Woman, Lucy, in Puerto Rico and later divorced her, too. He met his third wife in a camera store in Kansas City, Lahoma Jean Brown. She
had no idea who he was, and that got him going. This marriage was the one that lasted; he stayed married to her to the end of his life, and they had six children and a million pets and chickens.

  Paige immediately got the idea that he could earn more money on his own than he could pitching for Negro League teams with their short, somewhat eclectic schedules. Paige split the Crawfords and became famous for “jumping” teams to join others that made better offers. Paige did a lot of this “jumping,” or “barnstorming,” over the span of his career. Paige played in a million places, threw literally thousands of games, and was the most famous black athlete, if not person, in the United States. Most importantly, he proved that he belonged everywhere he went.

  He turned a job in the bushes of the segregated black sports world into an international platform, pitching from Mexico to Canada to Venezuela, and even made regular outings to North Dakota for a tournament where the owner gave him a car but then had to beg him to stop riding around with white girls in the daytime. So owners haven’t changed. He lived with his wife Janet in a modified boxcar, since there was no black neighborhood. Paige claimed the Indians thereabouts took a liking to him and gave him snake oil with venom to rub on his arm, which he swore by his whole career.

  The biggest semi-pro tourney in the 1930s was in Denver every year sponsored by the Denver Post newspaper. Satch brought lots of black players to the team there, and they dominated. He claims to have jumped to Venezuela in the ’30s because he “didn’t have a topcoat.” While there, he was playing outfield and chased a ball into the tall grass, where he came face-to-face with what he thought was a boa constrictor (even though they live in trees), and the next time he encountered a snake, he picked up a stick and “beat the devil out of that snake,” and because of this the runner scored. “The crowd chased me right out of the park and the manager of the club wouldn’t pay me for the game.” There’s the truth and there is a great story; Paige never let one interfere with the other.